Thursday, 15 August 2013

I didn't watch Monday night's "Benefits Britain: 1949" on Channel 4,
a show which subjected three victims (difficult to think of them otherwise) to a
supposed version of the 1949 benefits regime, as these benefits-based 'reality'
shows have a distressing tendency to make me want to hurl things at the TV -
and my laptop did in fact spontaneously hurl itself to the floor in apparent
despair, but I'd resolved to follow the #BenefitsBritain hashtag on twitter
throughout and see if I couldn't inject some actual reality into the
proceedings (as opposed to the faux-reality that was the show's entire
premise), as had a bunch of other disability and benefits activists.

So rather than watching the show directly, I ended up
watching it through the audience's eyes, and what a disturbing view that turned
out to be. The show focussed on three people, and actually turned out to have
much more of a disability focus than I realised in advance. There was the
vulnerable but cuddly pensioner Melvin - ' Melvin can come & live with
me. I'll make him a nice hot meal each night & he can tell me stories'
said one twitteree, apparently reducing him to the status of a Cabbage Patch
Doll. There was Craig, a young wheelchair user - 'this guy seems to have the
right attitude'. And there was Karen, a woman with multiple invisible
disabilities that limited her in non-apparent ways, who was overweight, who
wasn't her own best advocate and who was the only non-white participant - 'that
fat ignorant slag'. Disabled people would have had no trouble in predicting
how the audience acceptance would go even without the sample tweets. Knowing a
little about telling a story, it is clear that Karen had been deliberately
selected to be a figure of hate for the audience, and a perceptive tweet noted 'these
shows always have a cute one, a good one, and one to hate' - a view echoed
in New Statesman's review of the show.

Examples shown below are all text that appeared on the
#BenefitsBritain hashtag. This does mean a significant amount of swearing and
hate speech is included.

And what a figure of hate Karen (and anyone else with
invisible disabilities) became:

Here she is, fucking scrounger (Some seemingly had
made their minds up in advance)

Luckily for these slackers, it's difficult to prove
'pain'

Karen youve got all those problems cos ur a fat twat

Ditch the doughnuts fatty..... (accompanied by a cartoon
of an extremely overweight woman on a mobility scooter with the tagline
'Laziness, it's not a disability)

She's shattered?What about all these people that have 2
go out & work to live you benefit scrounging arsehole

a false disability claimant is the pits, same as as a
conscription dodger in ww1 #scum

You go back to fucking work you lazy cunt! Ok she’s
fucking winding me up.

Funny how it's the fat,foul mouthed bint with illness u
can fake that is the one with the issues

This woman on #BenefitsBritain is making my blood boil...
she's a fucking retard

Back in 1949 you'd be sectioned you horrible, lazy, fat,
scrounging whopper!

Yet all the while disabled people were trying to educate the
mob to the reality:

And a profound ignorance that disability frequently causes weight gain:

All the ailments this woman just described are all
associated with being obese, and what do you know? She's obese.

if Karen lost weight there would be a lot fewer health
problems!! Fat bitch

Fat woman on benefits cuz she's eaten too much drives off
in huge vehicle provided by taxpayers to haul her flab around in

And the inevitable 'I worked for DWP and know these
things':

I used to work in benefits and housing,
there's some very non-sick ppl claiming sick bens

One scene, with Karen challenged to work alongside a woman
with one hand, appeared to be a deliberate attempt to invoke the Hierarchy of
Disabilities. Faced with an audience with a limited understanding of disability
it inevitably succeeded:

So her mate with one hand is gonna shame her into doing a
days graft

Now she's telling a woman with one hand she can't do what
this woman is doing...

This is going to be good, refusing to work in front of a
worrying woman who has only one hand

It's actually funny that she is saying all this to a
woman with no arm! Does she realise how ridiculous she sounds?!

there are people on the show with one arm and missing one
hand, get a job you #Scum...

Disturbingly there were several people inciting outright violence:

Tbh Karen wants dowsing with freezing cold rancid milk

I want to punch her in the face!

I'd quite happily kick the shit out of that fat, lazy
fucker!!

This fukin lazy bitch on #BenefitsBritain should be put
down you could tell she couldn't be fukin arsed! Our welfare system is to soft!

Take the cane off that woman and beat her over the head
with it

Utterly contemptuous cow. I hope she really does become
confined by her ailments. Permanently. In a wooden box.

makes me think we should pump poison gas into every
public building and just start the country from scratch!

While racism raised its ever-ugly head:

Why has this old lady got corn rolls?? #ghettoscrounger

The truth is Karen is a pikey but sadly that's not a
disability

No mention of the Polish or other foreigners go down to
pagehall full of em

Karen: it's coz your black

Perhaps the only grimly amusing element to all the hate on
the #BenefitsBritain hashtag was that there appears to be a
statistically significant correlation between 'Hey, look what a stud I am' profile pictures and/or twitter names, and aggressive posts.

I decided to try engaging with one of the more prolifically
disablist tweeters to see where his views on disability lay (I picked him
rather than anyone else as he was still making openly disablist tweets on the
#BenefitsBritain hashtag sixteen hours later). His attitude was readily
apparent:

I've got flatulence, dandruff, a creaky knee and
intermittent gout - do I get an Aston martin on Motability?

'Disablism' - WTF is that?? Can I claim for it??

the glass-backed spongers who milk the system with their
mystery 'syndromes' and work-avoiding illnesses

I have a few mates that came back from Gulf War 1 -
they're proper disabled, none of this anxiety or agrophobia syndrome nonsense

Is it 'stress' ?? Can be awful I hear

Me thinks you doth protest too much....

you're happy enough when your hands are in my pockets

Point proven, I rather think, not just disablist in specific
reaction to Benefits Britain, but openly aggressive towards disabled
people in general, or at least those of us who aren't 'proper disabled'.
And Benefits Britain gave him the platform he so obviously wanted to spread his
hate.

The attitude towards disability from the baying hordes that Benefits
Britain summoned on to Twitter is superbly summed up in a Manny Shinwell
quote that a friend dug out of Hansard from 1952'the Tories never trouble themselves
about facts when prejudice can serve them better'. Plus ça change, plus
c'est la même chose.

Ultimately it is clear that Benefits Britain served
to enable an orgy of hate speech against disabled people, and it is difficult
to conclude that this was unintended, with Karen clearly selected and filmed in
such a way (the amputee sewing instructor for instance) as to cause maximum outrage. C4 and
the producers may argue that this is what the audience clearly wanted, but
their role as a responsible public-service broadcaster is not to enable the mob
in its hate of a vulnerable minority, but to inform the public as to the
reality those same people face. Rather than showing how difficult it is to gain
acceptance of invisible disability, the programme instead set Karen up to fail,
and as a deliberate target for hate, making it even more difficult for disabled
people to gain acceptance and understanding than it was before. Many of these
people indulging in hate speech may have already felt this way, but Benefits
Britain legitimised their hate and gave them a platform to express it
publically. We have already seen disability hate crime figures spiralling
upwards in direct response to scrounger rhetoric from the Mail and the Express,
so how can Channel 4 consider this to be responsible journalism?

I'll leave the final word to one of my own tweets during the
show:

I wonder how many disabled ppl will be abused as
'scroungers' in the street tomorrow as a result of #BenefitsBritain?

Sunday, 4 August 2013

This post is just a brief reminder that the DWP's consultation into the 20m limit for PIP Higher Rate Mobility closes on Monday 5th August. Anyone intending to respond who has not yet done so needs to reply before the end of business on Monday.